Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is a software delivery model in which a software vendor provides a single system—a SaaS system—that provides a software application service to multiple customers through the cloud. Typically, the software application is a business application and each customer represents a business or other organization. Members of an organization access the software application service from servers that host the software application.
Some conventional SaaS systems provide the software application to each customer on a separate server. For example, consider such a SaaS system that provides an email application to a company with a large number of employees. In this case, the software vendor provides the company with its own server. Each employee of the company accesses the email application from this server on his or her desktop computer using a web browser.
A software vendor providing a conventional SaaS system to a customer typically offers support to the customer in the form of a team of support personnel. The support personnel perform support tasks in response to support tickets submitted by the customer. In performing a support task, a support person logs into the customer's server and makes changes to server settings appropriate to the support task.